Baby Name Books? Really.

Plot springs from character…I’ve always sort of believed that these people inside of me—these characters—know who they are and what they’re about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don’t type. —Anne Lamott

“Are you trying to tell me something?” His expression is just a little panicky.

I just wanted to put my feet up after a day of baking Christmas pies and bury myself in the Baby Name Book and mindless TV. “No, why?”

“Well, uh, Baby Name Books scattered around are a little concerning.”

I sink into the love seat and twist around to look at him. “What you’re thinking is impossible, you know.”

“Yeah, but…”

“Double impossible.”

“Yeah, but…”

I look at the stack of books next to me, the scratch paper, clipboard, and pen. “You’ve never really been around when I’ve been building a character, have you?”

“I heard you talk about it, I think.” I always figured he wasn’t really listening, just sort of politely letting me yammer on and on. You know, husband and wife speak. I was impressed, he’d heard that much. “Build? And Baby Name Books figure into it?”

“Yes, for me, that’s first, along with the phone book.”

“You call them up?”

“No.” I smile. Wouldn’t that be great? Call the character and ask him/her about them self.

“Then what’s the phone book for?”

“Last names.”

His frown deepens. “Huh. Then what.”

“My cattle call binder and the horoscope book.” I point to the two five-inch wide binders and my dog-eared Linda Goodman’s Love Signs horoscope book.

“Do I want to know what you use them for? Cattle call binder?”

“I do try outs.”

“Try outs.” I get a blank stare.

“I go through pictures…of actors, magazine ads, what have you, until I find my character.”

“But now, it’s baby names. How do you decide on a name?”

A good question, but I don’t know how to answer, but I try. “There’s this shadow person, somewhere in my mind. Maybe, better called, a seed person. Once I learn their name, the details start coming to me. Until then, they kind of stay in the shadows.”

“I thought you were rewriting your Heart’s series.”

“I am.”

“Then aren’t the characters already…built?”

And he’s hit the nail on the head. When I started the series—I don’t even like to say how long ago…let’s put it this way, 3 computers ago…with all the information on floppies. My new computer doesn’t have one and thank goodness, for my computer guru—I started with the youngest brother and that is how it must progress, but I knew little about the others and it showed when they appear in the book.

Anyway, I’ve rereading everything—all of the first three books, found the gift of an editor’s notes all through the first three chapters of the first book when something happened. And then the dreams-day and night returned. Finally.

These last three years have been absent of the dreams or muse or whatever you want to say. I’ve worked along, writing or rewriting off the cuff, so to speak, figuring that was going to be the way I had to work from now on. It wasn’t as easy or as fun, and maybe, it would have been a blessing if I could have just stopped writing. I couldn’t. It just wasn’t going to be like before. It also left me a little disoriented. It just no longer felt completely like my way of writing, like there was this other layer or something. I didn’t dwell on it any more than I had to, but it did sadden me. I’ve always lived with that feeling of living two lives’s —mine, and the story life in my head. Hard, but familiar. I’ve been doing it all my life. Like a little twist to one of my favorite t-shirt quotes: I live in my own little two worlds but that’s ok, I know me there.

Recently there’s been a return of those day and night dream interruptions but gentle, vague proddings, not the vivid, attention-demanding interruptions I’m used to. Until I reread the series. As I said, as I wrote this series I worked away on the books, each one after the other, knowing where I was going, knowing the characters when I got to their book, but that fourth book—I couldn’t see any part of it. Could barely see Gallagher, the fourth brother, the brother everyone else looked up to. I tried. I did, but it just didn’t seem to happen.

Someone, I can’t remember who, told me not to worry, the story would get here when I was ready. But I was just blank about Gallaher’s story and worse, Gallagher. It was one of the reasons I stopped submitting the series. I think of it as abandoning it. I just kind of left it in mid-stride. Or it felt like that anyway. There was the rest of the story and I just didn’t know where or what it was. I felt certain it was there. I just didn’t trust it would arrive when I needed it. I find that a lot. The not trusting myself.

Last week, as I started the rewrite for the first book in the Heart’s Series, I bumped right into Gallagher and his romance. More than that, I realized what was wrong with the whole series. What was a missing piece, what was always missing? The series would never work, if I didn’t know, at least some of Gallagher’s story. Know his character, know the character of the woman he falls in love with. I couldn’t do a quality rewrite until I had at least a vague outline of his story and a great character sketch of him and his heroine.

Though the books needed to stand alone, they need to mesh, too. How else do you show a family of four boys and their love stories? I needed a name to go forward. And a woman. I needed a better character sketch for Gallagher. And just when I realized I needed it, it arrived.

Sometimes a name comes to you, but other times its gut knowledge, a recognition of a person. We know them, the characters in our books, like old acquaintances.

During this short week between holiday family get-togethers, I’ll be getting to know Gallagher and his lady. Finally.

Of Writing and Gardens

The longer I garden and write the more I think the two are alike. From the first lines of a new piece to a new or redone garden plot. To rewrites and editing to tearing out gardens and eliminating difficult plants or plants that just don’t work.

Sometimes things take awhile to work out and, sometimes, you have to have patience. Sometimes, a ton of patience. The best things I’ve ever learned about editing I learned in my garden.

When spring comes and I set out to buy seeds or plants, I always end up with too many. I fill my gardens to bursting. The rock cress spilling over the edging until my husband cusses while he mows, the shade garden so full there’s not a patch of bare ground and sometimes O accidentally step on a garden snake. (Suggestion: don’t go out in the garden bare-footed) The daisy fight their way up through the roses and the roses have shoulder space from the Hibiscus.

I always forget how big the plants will be. I have the hardest time when I go into the garden centers picking just one flower. It’s like picking a word. I love them all and maybe, if I don’t get petunias this year, I’ll forget how their perfume rising in the evening, warm and haunting. Maybe, if I don’t plant ‘Lady in Red’ salvia this year, I won’t see any hummingbirds at all.

I tend to write that way, too. That’s all right, too, because I know I have to trim the excess. Once I have it in place, I can relax and see what’s really supposed to be there. It may not be the best way, but it seems to be my way.

This lily, named Elodie, is an example of a plant I had to wait awhile for. It was worth it. I bought the bulbs last and was very disappointed.

Another plant I had to wait a long while for and the redeeming took place in my mother’s yard, not mine. Years ago, more than ten, I found a picture of a Hydrangea bush I just fell in love with in the Wayside Garden catalog. I sent away for one for me and one for my mother. When they arrived, one had been damaged in shipping. I planted that one and gave the good one to my mother. Well, my died over the winter. Wayside replaced it with no problems, but my plant seemed to struggle at first.

My mother’s took off. There have been beautiful blooms over the years and the blooms are so versatile. Perfect to put in a vase on the table, white and creamy with a hint of scent and the blooms remaining on the bush turn green, then pink, and finally in the fall, this gorgeous bronzy brown. Best of all you can bring them inside, put them in a vase without water and they’re lovely all winter.

Very best in a vintage turquoise vase.

My mother’s plant has flourished; mine has grown steadily and bloomed but never with as much enthusiasm as my mom’s. I have a ton more shade and the bush has to compete with a huge snowball bush. And of course, my mother’s soil is much different.

This year, though, the plant has outdone itself and the scent. No hint of scent with all these blooms. Oh, no. It infuses her whole back yard and the bee’s tea party there, of an afternoon.

I’ve always thought of my writing as my work, my garden as my hobby. (Along with crocheting which teaches a lot about writing, too. The biggest lesson: do a little bit every day and before you know it you have something useful: an afghan or a first draft) A perfect day is spending a good long morning in a white heat of writing—when everything is just working along, the words are flowing and they make sense. (Even a bad day writing, though, is a good day) Then, spending the afternoon following the shade through the yard, deadheading spent flowers.

And the perfect end to that day would be a good book. Someday, it might be mine. If I’m patient.